Jesse Ventura body-slams the media

As former Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura promotes his new book, “DemoCRIPS and ReBLOODlicans,” he’s having a difficult time getting booked in some places.

“This is the first book where I’m being cancelled,” Ventura told POLITICO.

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“Don Imus wouldn’t have me on,” said Ventura. “He always portrays that he’s this big tough guy. … Imus knows that he can’t intimidate me and he probably didn’t want to debate me over the Democrats and the Republicans. His producers wanted me big time and he vetoed me big time. He put the kibosh on.”

Ventura also says he’s being blocked by Fox News.

“I’m already falling victim to the corporate media,” Ventura says. “Fox wouldn’t have me on because, when they had me on before, I made the statement that I couldn’t understand that the U.S. was so shocked that we’d be attacked by terrorists when we’ve been practicing terrorism for 50 years. We just call it foreign policy. They got all indignant and said, ‘Give me an example.’ I said, ‘How about Cuba?’ Cuba has never done a thing to us and yet we have an embargo against them, we’ve blown up ships in their harbors, and we’ve tried to assassinate their president on multiple occasions.”

Ventura also provides more media criticism in his latest book, in a chapter titled, “Big Media’s Collusion with the Gangs.”

“In February 2003, I signed a three-year contract with MSNBC to host a talk show. Having recently decided not to run again for governor of Minnesota, I was still a pretty hot commodity. The show was originally scheduled for an hour, four nights a week,” he writes. “Soon after the deal was made, I was riding with MSNBC’s then-president Erik Sorenson to start doing preliminary set up of the show out in L.A. Later, what he said came to haunt me. Right after I’d gotten hired, Sorenson told me he’d gotten phone calls from two very high-ranking men in Washington. They wanted to know why MSNBC was giving me a national forum, and they clearly weren’t pleased about this. I asked Sorenson to name names, but he said he couldn’t.

“They’d told me I’d have complete artistic control, but almost from the get-go, I had to tell the cable network that I hadn’t been hired to read off a teleprompter. However, they wanted all the subjects and guests to be handed down from upstairs, and I started having to fight the brass on a daily basis. I wanted to do meat-and-potatoes journalism about things that impact people in the big picture — not tabloid stuff like they were feeding me. Before long, they’d scaled everything back; I’d go on once a week at 5:00 p.m. on Saturdays. In the worst possible time-slot, I still had the second rated news-talk show on MSNBC, right after Hardball. I’d completed five shows when the network cancelled it and bought out my contract that December. ‘And so it goes,’ as Linda Ellerbee used to say (she got canned, too).”